Infinite Metaverse Starts Now: Bringing Record Number of Concurrent Players to the Game

Star Atlas, a grand strategy game of space exploration, territorial conquest and political domination, faced a significant challenge: they wanted to create truly unlimited online worlds without being restricted to server instancing, which is the current industry standard.

This was a challenge for Star Atlas as they have a huge online community of hundreds of thousands of gamers and fans who wanted to play together in real time and in a single instance.

In short, they needed to build a server infrastructure capable of hosting and supporting an extremely large number of gamers without compromising on game quality or connectivity in a variety of game modes - including driving, shooting and exploring.

We, on the other hand, were looking to showcase the capabilities of our cutting-edge cloud compute technology in real-world applications and took on Star Atlas as a customer because of their unique creative game content, unique intellectual property and strong gaming community.

To integrate our advanced cloud compute technology with Star Atlas to achieve 30,000 networked concurrent users (CCUs) in a single world instance.

Let’s jump into our approach and how we executed it.

Target = 30,000 CCUs

First, we assembled a dedicated internal team to work on integrating our distributed cloud compute technology with Star Atlas.

This meant forging a strong relationship with their game development team and getting access to their code and tooling.

Once connected, we began implementing our technology and kicked off a rigorous testing and optimisation programme which would set the standard for reaching our big milestone.

Ease of Integration

Our solution is cloud agnostic, meaning it doesn’t matter if our customers use Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud or other providers.

Once integrated, we handle powering their entire game from a cloud computing standpoint.

This process is controlled accessible via the MetaGravity platform, which gives our customers a single viewpoint of how much bandwidth they’ve, how much they’ve saved as well as actionable controls over the size of the game simulation.

And because of our market-leading technology’s incredible efficiency, the output meant a significantly lower cloud computing bill for Star Atlas compared to a standalone solution.

Something they were very happy about. Talk about win-win!

Game Engine Optimisation

The other half of the solution we implemented for Star Atlas was our integration with their game engine, the application Star Atlas uses to design and build their game.

Once set-up, our technology focuses on the fundamental network routing of in-game information to and from external servers, which ultimately syncs player interactions and enables world state persistence on a supermassive scale.

The integration of our core technology meant that we could optimise the syncing on their in-game assets and character movements before they even reach the server.

Which when dealing with massive multiplayer game simulations, is a big factor in the game being not only scalable but sustainable in the long term.

All in all, our partnership yielded some remarkable results:

Tested 30,000 CCUs

One of the main milestones of our work with Star Atlas was to test 10,000 concurrent users in July 2023 at Solana PlayGG, which we did successfully.  It took our team just a few months to scale that milestone to 30,000 CCUs, which was announced by Star Atlas CEO Michael Wagner and MetaGravity founder Rashid Mansoor at Solana Breakpoint in November later that year. What followed in January 2024 was a live player test with the Star Atlas community.

Reduced Development Costs

We reduced the server architecture development costs by 34%, along with maintenance & running costs to a fraction compared with instance multiplication - allowing Star Atlas to allocate more resources to creative aspects such as design and engineering.

Faster Development Cycle

Our integration made it possible for Star Atlas to build faster due less time on trying to scale the game’s infrastructure and focus on game design and high-end gameplay.

The integration of the MetaGravity Engine made it possible for Star Atlas developers to test the build in a matter of hours, rather than days. This was a “dramatic change in quality of life for our developers,” according to their team.